An Ant-Inspired Track-to-Track Recovery Approach for Construction of Cell Lineage Trees

Correct track-to-track association is crucial to the construction of cell lineage trees as well as the discovery of novel biological phenomenon that occur at rare frequencies. In this paper, an ant colony optimization based heuristic approach is proposed to link potential tracks through minimizing the cost function that mainly occurs on the fragmented intervals with the constraint of maximum inter-frame displacement. Specifically, both cell motion and morphology are emphasized in the defined cost function, and two decisions are made respectively to recover the mitotic and non-mitotic cases. Our method has proven to be feasible that can repair the broken tracklets caused by large migration, occlusion and mitosis missing, as well as false positives and missed detections, and can effectively help the construction of reliable cell lineage trees.